Entries Tagged as 'house'

I’m not completely finished with our nursery yet, but I wanted to share one of my most exciting projects with you guys: this DIY dresser!

So, let me make this fully clear: I do not consider myself a crafting wizard. Most DIY projects are way too tricky and time-consuming for me, and I tend to generally avoid them. But this one is just so easy, I felt like it would be cruel if I didn’t share it!

(Also, I have a secret weapon: my father in law is incredibly handy, and lives 20 minutes away, which is pretty much the best thing that has ever happened to me. It means that when I start being all “I wonder if it’s safe to inhale spray paint at four months pregnant,” my awesome mother and father in law swoop in and remove the paint can from my general proximity ASAP!)

But even without handy in-laws, this is one you guys can attempt at home! I love IKEA furniture — once it’s constructed, don’t get me started on the actual assembly process — but sometimes it tends to be a little bit… plain. It’s pretty and it’s well-built, but their designs are sometimes just too simple for my taste.

Which means that it’s time to dress them up!

For this project, you need:

A set over Overlays. I bought the Anne set for the Hemnes dresser, which is available here.

My step-by-step photos are below, but I also have a few tips you should know about!

First, when you spray paint the Overlays, use the mounting tape (make sure it’s the removeable kind) to elevate them slightly from whatever they’re resting on (we used cardboard). That way, you can spray paint the sides of the overlays more easily, and they won’t stick to the backdrop.

Also, when you’re attaching the Overlays to the drawers, use only a small amount of Liquid Nails, because you don’t want to get any on the rest of the dresser.

Other than that, this is a pretty quick, easy DIY project that produces an amazing, gorgeous result!

I’ve been wanting to put up this post for such a long time, but it’s been so hard to decide when our house was finally “done.” Even after a year, I’m still tweaking things all the time — adding new pieces to the walls, finding little accents pieces, and even moving furniture around — but at some point, it becomes time to silence the it could be a tiny bit better voice, and just say: This is it. This is how I decorated our house, and I’m quite proud of how it turned out.

Another thing I’m quite proud of: it was done for very little money. Putting down the down payment on this house essentially drained our savings, but that wasn’t all — from the second we saw this place, we knew that it needed a pool. So, literally within weeks of moving in, we had a pool company bring the idea in my head to life (I basically slowed them a Pinterest photo and asked them to adapt it to our backyard) and we’d signed a contract to have them put it in.

One little wrinkle. We’d hoped to put the cost of the pool into our mortgage so that we wouldn’t have to pay the whole cost in cash, but our very conservative bank told us ‘not a chance’ when we brought it up. So, weeks after closing on a very expensive house, we suddenly had to get our hands on quite a bit of extra money to put in the pool.

Here’s where I’d like to say that we robbed a bank or won the lottery, but instead… we saved. We basically took our disposable income down to zero the summer that we moved into our house, putting off buying new clothes, taking trips and many, many other luxuries, so that we could put as much of our paychecks into our savings account (and then, immediately after, into the hands of the pool company) as we possibly could. And we did it — it wasn’t easy, but by the time the final payment came due, we’d saved more than enough. I’m actually quite proud of that, because I know that if we’d financed it, we never would have paid it off this quickly, and it likely would still be hanging over our heads a year later.

But, to make a long story short, because we were saving so carefully for the pool, our budget for decorating was very, very low. And yet, we were moving from a small two-bedroom apartment into a four-bedroom house, with things I’d never even dreamed of when we lived in New York (a dining room! a tv room! an office that isn’t one of the bedrooms!). Basically, we were moving a New York couple’s amount of stuff into a Texas-sized house… eek.

We were able to buy a bunch of furniture from the prior owner of the house, which was terrific — it took care of some of the huge empty spaces without me having to go out and buy new couches and tables and chairs. And some of it wasn’t exactly my style — maybe I would have chosen differently if I’d picked them out myself — but I found that with the right accent pieces and placement, I actually liked them a lot.

And basically everything else… is from the internet. Ebay, Gilt, RueLaLa, Overstock.com, and a bunch of others — I scoured and scoured, and when I found something I loved, I snapped it up. The result is definitely a little eclectic, but they’re pieces that I truly love and are totally unique to us. If I had to do it over tomorrow, I’d do it exactly the same way.

So I’m excited to share these snaps with you guys — after a little over a year in this house, it really feels like home (I’m only showing the downstairs in this post, because upstairs is still very much a work in progress… but hopefully later this fall or winter, I will!). Chad and I both feel very, very lucky to have found a place we love so much, and it’s exciting to think of the many more years that are in store for us here!

This past weekend, I was originally planning to go out of town but wound up cancelling the trip at the last minute (nothing’s wrong — just too much coming up at once for me to get away). Chad was already planning to be gone for the weekend, so when faced with the somewhat unappealing prospect of being in our house for three days by myself, I came up with a plan: I threw a party!

Our pool wasn’t finished until November, which is getting chilly (even in Texas), so we haven’t had much time to really enjoy it in the last few months. So I figured that now that the weather is in the 70s and 80s pretty regularly, I’d have some friends over to chill out poolside for some cocktails and light summery dishes.

Sadly, I got married in the days before Pinterest, when I had to scour bridal magazines for little bits of inspiration — but now I channel all those lovely pictures into party ideas! Lately I’ve been loving whimsical, eclectic pieces — so I wanted this party to have a soft, feminine feel. For the tables, I tons of gorgeous pieces from BHLDN, which has pretty much the most beautiful, unique pieces I’ve ever found. I fell completely in love with these mix-and-match plates and bud vases, and threw in basically every champagne glass I could muster up. Fortunately, they all look great together!

Since we had a big fashion blogger contingent, obviously we had to do a group pic! I bought balloons with the idea that they’re be effortless and pretty, but they mostly just ended up in the pool. Fortunately, we fished them out for at least one photo!